Andrea’s Nudes

My whole artistic career I’ve painted my work with oil on canvas, I’ve painted different subjects like Ipanema and elephants, vases of burnt flowers, etc, always with an impressionist style with the use of concentrated paints in many layers. But for this entire thirty years of my career as an artist, I’ve always had the desire to explore hyper-real art, and separately, erotic art.

Following recent advice from the great Brazilian art collector Jean Borguicci, after I took over the wall in the front of his gallery and collection on Joana Angelica Street in Ipanema, I stopped painting definitively and dedicated my work entirely to graffiti. With the evolution of my stenciling technique, I’ve managed to photograph and transport to the walls people I know in carioca culture, with realistic images that conquer the public immediately. And just like a book gains life when it is written, and with Rio’s climate as my accomplice, it naturally happened that I began to photograph people naked, starting with a couple of my European friends who were going to get married in a week and agreed to pose nude with their backs to my camera for my graffiti. Always with the promise of anonymity.

I started my erotic series at the end of 2013, spraying this couple on the walls of Ipanema to test the receptivity of the public. Success came fast, and it wasn’t long before the journalist Fernando Gabiera raised the question on his show as to whether showing naked graffiti in Ipanema is possible.

Thus the book started writing itself naturally, with ever more naked characters, and the nudity becomes ever more daring and eroticized. For now nobody knows how far this will go.